IRC Networks Unite in Fight Against Fizzer Worm

Dave writes "Over the past few days, IRC Networks across the internet have felt the brunt of the Fizzer worm. In an unusual display of geek solidarity, representatives from dozens of IRC Networks, including EFNet, IRCNet and DALnet, have gathered to create a Fizzer Task Force. Interesting, and mostly productive results have occurred so far from such a meeting of the IRC minds."

Comments

As Well They Should ...

[AlabamaMike]

Not to point fingers, but as we all know IRC networks are a major conduit for the distribution of warez. I'm not living in a glass house here, so I'll admit that I've gotten viruses from "packs" downloaded through IRC networks. It's good to see that these guys are coming together and helping to stem the spread of this virus. Unfortunately, I've heard nothing from the KaZaA guys in this line, and they are probably much worse than the IRC people (all their clients are Windows platforms, most of their users are completely clueless, etc.) It takes some skills (not much, but some) to get stuff off IRC. Any jackass can download from KaZaA. That's where the real work needs to be done in order to stop this virus cold.
-A.M.

PEBCAK

[Kjella]

Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. To the very best of my knowledge I haven't been infected by any virus or trojan since the early 90s when I didn't have Internet access and fast virus updates.

But even running around nekkid, I don't think I'd have caught more than a handful of viruses to begin with. Why the hell is it that people open up all the crap executable stuff they get? I think the best hope is a new generation that has grown up with SPAM, viruses etc. and don't fall for that kind of bullshit. Teaching old dogs new tricks doesn't work, but they will die eventually...

Kjella

Re:PEBCAK

[Ed Avis]

The best hope is a user interface that clearly distinguishes between *running a program* and *opening a document*. Windows over the years has deliberately blurred this - even in Win3.x Program Manager the command to run an application was called 'Open'. Cute, but it doesn't help people learn the difference between documents, which are just data that can be viewed, and programs, which are instructions for your machine to perform.

You may object that things like Word macros (and their associated viruses) blur the line between files and executables. But that is another instance of the same problem: 'opening' such a document should be split into the two questions it implies: do you want to *view* the file contents? do you want to *execute* the instructions in the file?

If user interfaces and especially mail clients bothered to present this distinction to the user then a lot of the worm problems would go away. Some people would still have virus checkers, mostly companies who don't trust their employees not to execute dancing_elephants.exe. But even in those cases, it would be simple to lock down mail clients to not allow execution, as long as they bother to make a clear distinction between viewing and executing to start with. (And as long as the applications they launch, such as Word, do the same.)

One way of explaining this in non-technical language is: 'If I sent you a letter and it said "please jump off the nearest cliff" and you read it, would it do any harm to you? Why should the equivalent message sent to a computer be any different?'